


a life cycle based in repossession

by Anonymous



Series: a moment, prompted [8]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Snippet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 03:36:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29744403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: When the time comes, they release their hold on the body they have borrowed.
Series: a moment, prompted [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2186166
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10
Collections: Anonymous, Unofficial FFA Anon Collection





	a life cycle based in repossession

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written on FFA, for the prompt "100 words of giving him my body and getting nothing in return"
> 
> (minor content warning for some lowkey dissociation/out-of-body feelings)

It does not belong to them, this body.

It was made from an egg, pale root and yolk and carapace, and laid to stew in the depths. An emptiness devoured it as acid does stone, until no heart remained -- a husk, pure and lifeless in perfection; a parcel of falsehood and shadow under shell.

They are a parasite, surely, some opportunistic thing clinging tightly to the vestiges of this corpse, wriggling their thoughts and hopes and dreams ever so cruelly into the cracks in its chitin. This will doom it, they understand, when the time comes, but they will sooner see the world crumble than let go too soon. They will not fall before their time.

It arrives, though -- the occasion to release their hold on this kindly immortal shell that has, by no will of its own, granted them a temporary passage through life. Whatever their own nature, it is more than they could have asked for.

The oldest owner perished with its flesh, laying no claim; it may as well have never owned it at all. What it could have called a self lies under the deepest weight of the sea, long since repossessed. After this remains only the dispute of two ownerships: the sea, whose flesh may hunger for a matched shell to encase it, and the pale light, its creator and inventor, who guides and shapes it as a potter's clay and tinkerer's prototype and father's child.

The sea lies below endless strata of caverns and stone, and the light stands directly before them. The body, strung and chained from above, is sustained wholly by the greater corpse of the temple when they step free of it; they slip smoothly into the phantom spaces on the edge of a grand and gleaming dream. The choice seems obvious, of course. It is relinquished unto the light, as was always meant to be. They watch, overlaid and slightly askew, a projection more than a consciousness, and this seems the last of it as they fade.

The creator-tinkerer-father apologizes to the body, before he leaves. For a time, they await his return to collect it, pondering. They have given back what is rightfully his, yet he refuses to claim it. The body hangs still, and the shadows sit stagnant in its frame.

Then the dream begins to burn, and they understand, but by then it is far too late.


End file.
